Radiant Comics

“A Burst of Need” 22×30 inches.

I usually scan in my art as a matter of course. It’s part of my habit. A drawing, a painting, or a sketch in a sketch book, if it’s flat I can put it on my scanner and digitize it. It’s part of my working process. I make a thumbnail sketch, scan it in, blow it up, print it out, and then make a drawing right on top of the thumbnail, scan in that drawing, print it out, and ink over top of that one. Then I scan in the inks. If it’s one of my faux comic book covers I color over the inks with marker and then scan in the finished piece.

I tell you all this to let you know that scanning is no big deal to me. I do it all the time. I have a tabloid size (11×17 inches) scanner so that makes things easier since I often work on 11×17 inch paper. Back when I only had a 8.5×11 inch scanner I use to have to scan 11×17 inch stuff in two pieces and then stitch them together in Photoshop. I still have to do that when I make something 16×20 inches but it’s not very hard. I’ve been at this a long time.

But there is one scanning chore that I’ve been putting off for a long time. Scanning in my Big Ink Drawings. I first made some of these 22×30 inch drawings back in mid 2012 and kept making them until mid 2015. In the end I had made twenty six of them. Then from last September (2018) until January I made another twenty eight of them. That’s a lot of big drawings.

As I was making all those new big ink drawings at the end of 2018 I was thinking to myself that I would have to scan them all in. Turns out that just like with the first batch of those drawings that it’s easier to think about scanning them in then to actually scan them in. I think one of the problems was that I had no real reason to scan them in. I’ve photographed them all and have posted photos of them and it’s not like any of them have gone anywhere so why scan them? I have no real answer except for that I wanted to.

Photographs are okay for posting these big ink drawings on social media but not really for archiving them. If I ever want to make something printed from them I would need scans. I’m not even sure why I would need to make printouts of them but you never know. So over the weeks I got closer and closer to really scanning them until one afternoon I finally did.

I find it odd that I started the project in the afternoon. I’m a morning person. That’s my most creative time. Maybe that’s why when I contemplated scanning I didn’t want to start in the morning. It’s just too dull a job to be at my peak. So a few more days went by and I still couldn’t get it done. Then Saturday afternoon at about 3:30 I decided to just jump into it.

The first hurdle to scanning was that I had to move my scanner. It’s regular spot can’t accommodate a 22×30 inch piece of paper. If it could I would have scanned these in as I went along. I pulled out a spare table, set it up in front of my computer, and moved my scanner onto it. Of course I had to also unplug the power and USB cables before I moved the scanner adding to the chore.

The rest was as mundane as it gets. I’d place the top left quadrant of the drawing on the scanner, secure it in place with a piece of tape, name the file, scan, untape, move to the bottom left, tape (same piece), scan, untape, flip the drawing, top right, tape, set up the scanner to flip the image, scan, untape, bottom right, untape, and I’m done with that one. Repeat that 52 times.

The scanning itself didn’t take a long time. Being that I was scanning in greyscale (they’re black and white drawings) it took one third the time of a color scan. I’m not sure of the exact time but I bet it was about a minute a scan. That’s 208 scans and 208 minutes. The whole operation took me from about 3:30 until 8:30 with half an hour in there for dinner. That might have been less time than I imagined but it didn’t go quickly.

The most surprising thing about all that scanning to me was how physically taxing it was. I’ve spent days scanning in batches photos and negatives that took me more time but the photos were more mentally taxing than physically. Moving all the drawings took a lot out of me. The drawings are not heavy but they have to be handled carefully. Plus my hands are several feet apart as I move the drawings. Each one had to be picked up from the “To Do” pile, moved four times for four scans, and then be place on the “Done” pile. That adds up to more than I suspected.

After an hour of scanning I started to sit down between scans. I usually stand and work so it was odd to sit. Of course sitting didn’t always work because I has to get up so often to get the next scan going. I did have the TV to keep my company. I watched three episodes of “Friends”, one of “Broad City”, one of “FBI”, a one episode of “White Dragon.” At least that’s what I can remember. I think I watched some YouTube stuff in there too.

When I was done I was done. Wiped out. I was also a little bit afraid to put everything away. I would have hated to get the scanner back in its place only to find out I missed something. So I checked everything carefully and then finally put things back in their places.

The one thing that hasn’t happened with the scans yet is that they’re not stitched together. Each drawing is still in four separate scans. I have to put the pieces together. But that’s for another day. Who knows when that will be?

I love sketchbooks. What artist doesn’t? Also, like most artists that I know, I have more sketchbooks than I have time to fill them. Sure I have my main ink book sketchbook that I work in consistently but besides that I have a lot of others that I either hope to work in one day or that I’ve worked in now and again. Sometimes I buy sketchbooks just because they’re cool and sometimes people give me sketchbooks and they go on the pile. I never turn them down.

One of they types of sketchbooks that I like is the pocket sketchbook. The original one I got years ago is a Moleskine sketchbook . I heard a character on a TV show describe Moleskines as “The notebook for people with more money than sense” and I kind of agree with that. They’re on the expensive side. They’re really nicely made though. A small 3.5×5.5 inch hardcover sketchbook with nice creamy drawing paper in it goes for about fifteen bucks. That’s not cheap.

Since the success of Moleskine other companies have gotten into the act and have made cheaper versions of pocket sketchbooks. I have a few of these too. I have them at different shapes and sizes in hardcover and softcover. I’ve got a tiny 2×3 inch one that’s half an inch thick with paper. It’s tiny and big at the same time. I’ve never found a use for that one but I hold out hope. I’ve got a vertical 5.5×3.5 inch Moleskine that’s has some really nice watercolor paper in it. Not to mention a bigger 7×5 inch version of the same sketchbook. I don’t usually use watercolor so they sit unused.

I haven’t bought any new sketchbooks in a while (besides my once a year ink book sketchbooks) because I have six in the pile of unused sketchbooks right now. That’s a fair amount. I like them all but I don’t really need them at the moment. The main reason I don’t need them is that I’m not really one to go out and sketch things. A lot of artists who work in sketchbooks go out in the world, sit in the landscape (or cityscape), and sketch what they see in their sketchbooks. I don’t do that. I’m more of a studio artist. Though I have been drawing in the train station this month.

I’ve been commuting in to Manhattan to do some teaching so that means taking the train from Nanuet to Secaucus Junction and then into Penn Station from there. Since my class doesn’t start until 11 AM I’m not commuting during regular rush hour(s). I have few trains to chose from. Rather than cutting it close I go in a little bit early and wait at the Secaucus Junction Station for a bit. It’s much nicer than waiting at Penn Station. I pull out my ink book as I’m waiting and draw in it. But I’m not sketching from life. I’m drawing out of my head as if I was in my studio. One day I’ll have to try and draw the station but I haven’t yet.

My ink book is a spiral bound 5.5×8.5 inch sketchbook. That’s the type of book I’ve been using for about 19 years. I sometimes like to keep my sketchbooks for a single purpose so I started another one a couple of months ago that is just for superhero heads. I make comic book sketch covers with super hero heads on them and like to figure out how I’m going to draw them before I start the final drawing. So far I’ve only drawn three heads in it but I like the concept. If I want to draw a Spider-Man head I can use my sketchbook to figure out how and then use the book as a guide. Maybe I’ll fill it up someday.

Sketchbooks are on my mind because I pulled out an old one this week and was a little shocked that I hadn’t drawn in it for two and a half years. I dated the pages when I drew in it so I’m sure of when. Time flies.

I’ve long had the idea of a sketchbook as a piece of art. Normally my sketchbooks are what I’d call evidence of art. I start and work out ideas for art in them but they are not the finished art themselves. They’re a vital piece in the chain of making art but they’re not very mysterious or interesting. If you look at them you know exactly what they are. They’re the start of something. But what if they were the end? What if they were the art?

I think the idea for that comes form TV shows and movies where the characters find some mysterious notebook or sketchbook (even the mysterious notebooks almost always have drawings in them) that are filled with clues to some mystery the plot is trying to solve. The characters have to pour over and decipher what the book is saying. The book is the thing. It’s the end product with the answers to the mysteries being the art. I’ve always found that idea appealing.

According to the starting date of this sketchbook I bought it in May of 2011. The last page I drew on has a date of August of 2016. In those five years I only wrote and drew on 22 of the 80 pages. That’s front and back so it’s really 44 of the 160 pages but still that’s not a lot of the book.

The sketchbook even has a sort of theme to it. It’s called a “PresentationZen Storyboarding Sketchbook.” Some of the pages have squares on them to storyboard stuff, some have tiny spot drawings, and others have positive affirmations on them. I think the selling point was that the book was supposed to encourage ideas and creativity. I don’t know how well that worked for me.

Looking back at it I wrote and drew lots of ideas in the book. I even made stickers out of some of my photos and pasted them down on the pages at times. It may only be a quarter filled but it’s a pretty cool looking book. I don’t know how much good it really did me but that’s okay. I pulled it out this week because I’ve been trying to visualize some info graphics stuff and have been stuck on that. Maybe this past approach will help me in the present. Let’s hope so.

I drive a 2009 Honda Civic. It’s hard to believe but ten years have almost passed since I bought it in the fall of 2009. It’s been a good and reliable car for me and only has about 35,000 miles on it. It’s been throwing me some curves recently though. I had a big $1400 repair bill for it last fall to get it to pass inspection. Stuff wears out in nine years. But at least it’s never broken down on me. I did hit a dear with it back in December of 2012 and though it needed repairs it still ran after the collision.

Last Thursday I was driving to my local comic shop. It was my usual Thursday night run except I was startled by a light showing on my dashboard. I had never seen it on before and had no idea what it was but the initials TPMS were lit up. That made me nervous. I kept driving and met my friend Rob at the comic shop and I told him and John (who works there) about the light. They both knew what it was and were surprised that I hadn’t run into it before.

It turns out that TPMS stands for Tire Pressure Monitor Sensor. I knew I had a tire pressure light in my car. It had gone off before to tell me that my tire pressure was low. The first time that one went off I had no idea what it was. But I didn’t know that a light goes off when the car can no longer sense the tire pressure because the monitor wasn’t working. That was new to me. But I was assured that it didn’t really matter to the car’s functioning. I’d just have to keep track of my tires’ pressure the old fashioned way. By checking them myself.

Now we can cut to the next day. On that Friday I drove another friend to the Newark Airport. The drive was uneventful and then I got home and parked the car in my garage. I didn’t go anywhere on Saturday so the car sat there until Sunday when I decided to go to the store. As I pulled the car out of the garage something didn’t sound or feel right. I got out and saw a flat tire on the front drivers side.

I didn’t own a car all through my twenties and most of my thirties and so have never had a flat tire before. I wasn’t really sure what I was supposed to do. I pulled it back into the garage and borrowed my sister’s car to go to the store. As I was out I remembered watching my brother-in-law fix a hole in a tire last summer. When I got back I looked up how to plug a leaking tire on the internet and watched a video. The guy pulled a screw out of a tire and used a tire plug kit to fix the leak. It took five minutes.

I decided to pull my car out of the garage and see if I could find what made my tire go flat. To move the car I had to put air in my tire first and used my bicycle pump to get it back to about 30 psi. That took 250 pumps by the way. Pretty fatiguing. Sure enough my tire also had a screw sticking out of it. This inspired me to try and fix my own tire. So with my sister’s car I went to the local auto parts store to get a tire repair kit. It was ten bucks plus tax and came with two tools, a pressure gauge, and about six plugs.

The first tool is like a big needle the the sticky plug goes through like a giant piece of thread. The second tool is a round file to scrape and clean the sides of the hole. So just like in the video I got a wrench to pull the screw out, put the file tool in the whole to smooth it, stuffed the needle tool and plug into the hole, worked the plug all the way in (it took considerable force), an pulled sharply on the needle tool which came out and left the plug behind in the hole. It was remarkably easy and stopped the leak.

After that I went back to the internet to see what to do next. Was the tire really fixed? Did more need to be done with it? Would it need to be replaced? I found no consensus. Some people said plugs can outlast the tire itself. Some said the plug could fail in a day, a week, or a year. One guy who owned a tire shop said he’d never drive on a plugged tire. But he also said owns a tire shop and sees all sort of bad tire problems. If the plug held you didn’t go see him. My father said that I probably needed to replace the tire.

After a fitful night’s sleep (because I really can’t afford more car bills. I haven’t paid off last fall’s $1400 bill) I decided to head over to the local tire place. I checked with guy there if I should patch it from the inside or get a new tire and he asked, “Is the plug holding?” I said that so far it was. He said “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it.” He also told me to monitor the pressure and bring it back for him to fix if it loses pressure in the next few days. A solid plan.

I’m still not out of the woods yet. I’ll keep my eye on the tire pressure using that new gauge I got with the kit. By the way I put the kit in my car’s trunk just in case. I even put my spare bicycle tire in there too. So if I’m out on the road and get a flat I can put a plug in and pump up the tire. Now if only there was some way for my car to keep track of my tire pressure.

“The Ghost of Fifth Street” Page 1

As I often do I’ve been contemplating comic books lately. This time I’ve been thinking about comic books and how they’re written. Not the nuts and bolts of how to write something but the style that a comic book is written in.

Over the years I’ve heard comic books (and other things) described as “Dated.” It’s not a compliment. The speaker usually means the comic book seems old fashioned. That’s a synonym for dull. I’ve always been of the mind that everything is dated. Everything is of its time. We just can’t always see the markers of that time until some more time has passed. Every comic book that is made today will seem dated in a certain amount of years. That’s the way of the world.

One of the criticisms I hear of comic books from the 1970s and 1980s is that they are over written. There are too many words on the page. Some time around the late 1990s a new writing style developed that was called “Decompressed Storytelling” and it took over a lot of the comics biz. It was a storytelling style that had a lot fewer words in it. Gone were thought balloons and omniscient narrators but first person narration in captions was here to stay.

I was down with decompressed storytelling when it was new and on the fringe. It depended a lot more on art and needed a good artist to pull it off so not everyone could do it well. But soon everyone was doing it and there was a big downside. Stories that used to be told in one or two issues now took six issues. I found it insane that Marvel retold Spider-Man’s origin story, which was originally only ten pages, over the course of six issues. That’s roughly one hundred and twenty five pages. That’s nuts.

So the bloom came off the rose for me somewhere in the early 2000s. I was no longer interested in decompressed storytelling in any way. Not that I never read any again but, as a style, it no longer held my interest in any way.

I also want to say that most of that kind of storytelling came out of mainstream comics in which the writer and artists were two different people. Being mostly an indie comics guy I have read and continue to read a lot of comics that are written and drawn by one person. I’ve noticed these one person comics are almost never accused of being over written. I think that’s because there is a natural economy of words when the person writing them is also the person drawing.

When a comic book writer hands off his writing for someone else to draw I think there is a tendency for the writer to want to put as much of himself on the page as possible. Drawing takes a lot more time and work to do than writing so maybe a writer can overcompensate a little bit. Then the criticism of overwriting can come into play.

I’ve recently come to a new conclusion. I prefer over writing to under writing. I’ve never had this thought before but I must have been leaning that way all along. I’ve read way too many comic book where almost nothing happens. I’ve heard other people make that same complaint but it has never occurred to me before now to call that out as underwriting. A comic book where not much happens is an underwritten comic book. It’s very frustrating when that happens.

Recently I’ve been reading a lot of one dollar Marvel True Believers comics. The ones I’ve read have been reprints of key 1970s comic books. That’s the era where there were lot more words on the page. It turns out that’s okay with me. If the writing is good how can more of it be bad? That’s what it really comes down to. If the writer is good with words and weaves them together in a pleasing way why do I care if there are a lot of them on the page? As long as it doesn’t interfere with the art and story all is good.

If the writing was bad in one of these overwritten stories I skipped stuff. It wasn’t holding my interest so what did it matter if there were ten words or two that I wasn’t reading? A story I don’t like doesn’t get better if there is less to it and a story I do like I want more of.

Early Conan the Barbarians are a good example of a comic with a lot of writing that I liked. Marvel reprinted four or five early issues and they were all good. There was a lot of writing in them but it was good writing. I was drawn in. The story was well crafted and a lot happened in those short twenty two pages. I got a beginning, middle, and end. Often today’s underwritten stories are a muddle of middle.

One last thing that got me thinking of this was that I bought a comic this week that was underwritten. It was the last issue of a six issue mini series. Over all the series has been a good one. I bought all six issues after all. But the last issue was over a quarter of the way through. Issue five ended with a cliffhanger after a surprise plot twist but then issue six resolved that cliffhanger right away which pretty much resolved the whole story. The last three quarters of the last issue was cleaning up the mess. It was a little disappointing.

That’s the word I’d use with most underwritten stories. Disappointing. They’re not necessarily bad stories but they offer me very little. When you go out to lunch and they serve you a handful of grapes you will be disappointed. I expect a meal for my money when I’m buying lunch and I expect a story with my comic book when I buy one. I don’t always get one. When something is overwritten I usually get a story. “At least the portions are big” is a real thing for me when it comes to comic books.

I’m taking a break from working on a large photograph to write about working on a large photograph. I’m not sure how much of a break this really is but I’ll give it a go. Recently I was looking through some of my old photographs from my Marvel Comics days to find something I wanted to post on Facebook. I settled on a photo of Fabulous Flo Steinberg in a Groucho mustache and glasses combo from Halloween of 1996.

I took a bunch of photos all through my Marvel days but not nearly enough. They were the days before digital photography so photos weren’t as easy to take and were a lot more expensive to develop and print. Sometime in 1990 or 1991 I bought an Olympic Stylus camera. That was a small (about the size of a large bath size bar of soap) 35mm film camera that I carried around in my pocket as a matter of course. I’d pull it out every now and again to take a photo of something or someone. I took more photos than anyone else there at the time but I still wish I had taken more.

The Halloween day that the photo of Flo was from was a day where I took a lot of photos. Or at least a lot for my days of shooting on film. I took 51 photos that day all at the the office Halloween party. Those parties were a big deal at Marvel in those days but this was a weird one.

Marvel was having money troubles due to all sorts of shenanigans by the big wigs and was heading towards bankruptcy which it finally declared in December of that year. On top of that editor Mark Gruenwald, who for years was the master of ceremonies for all of the Marvel office parties, had died suddenly and unexpectedly just a couple of months ago in August. This was the first Halloween party without him. Everyone wanted to carry on in his honor but it wasn’t the same without him. He usually had a bullhorn and ran all the goofy party games. He loved them.

In looking at these fifty one photos from the day I was inspired to make one of my large photo collages out of them. Inspiration is one thing but you’d better have more than that if you want to finish a project. Luckily I seem to have some sort of compulsion to finish is as it takes a lot of work. I’m on my fourth day of working on it and I’m not even done yet. But I’m getting close.

It was really tough going at first. After I was inspired to make this photo collage I noticed that the scans of the negatives had a lot of problems. Back in the early 2000s I scanned in all of my 35mm negatives from 1985-2001. It took weeks to do. I kept all my negatives in sleeves so they were pretty well protected but these particular negatives had a lot of dust and scratches on them. I’m not sure why but they were worse off than my usual negatives. So I would have to clean up the scans in Photoshop by hand. Lots of color correcting, using the healing brush, and the clone tool.

The cleaning of the scans part took three days. It’s a task that had to be done but it’s not the most interesting thing to do. Sometimes I’m okay with tasks like that. I’m just using my eyes and reacting to whatever I see. If I see a dust spot I click with the healing tool. Over and over. Sometimes it can be very meditative but mostly it’s tedious. At least I can listen to shows, music, podcasts, or whatever as I do it.

By the end of the third day I was ready to start working on the actual large photo rather than cleaning the individual pieces. The problem was I still had no idea what I wanted the final piece to look like. I had fifty one pieces but no puzzle box to look at. I noticed I had two types of photos. Pictures of individual people and pictures of the event. I decided to make two rows of individual people on the top and bottom and place the event photos in the middle of them.

At first I guessed wrong about how wide the individual photos should be. I set up guides and gutters at two and a half inches apart and started to layout the photos in that pattern. I ran out of room before I ran out of photos. It was back to the drawing board to set them up at two inches apart. This time I got it right. It took a few hours to get all the photos in place but this was the easy part. Thinking up the pattern can be difficult but once the kinks are worked out following a pattern is easy.

Now I had to work out the middle but I had nothing. Usually when I make one of my large photo collages I work around a large central image or three. But I didn’t have that for this one. I had taken these photos before I developed my large collage style so they weren’t taken with that in mind. After a few false starts I decided to just start placing photos and not worry about a central idea until I saw one developing. So that’s what I did. I’d place one photo, resize it, place another, try to find a place for a third, and so on.

I did that all morning and finally after about fifteen photos were placed I started to see what I wanted to do. Then I dropped the final five in the middle section and everything fell apart. But that was okay. I knew I could get it. I knew I had a good visual idea and all it would take was time and perseverance. So I kept at it until I got it done. At least that part. The hard part.

Now, as I take this break, I only have the border to do. I often string a bunch of images around the outside of the photo collage to make a border of images. This time I’m using my “Border of Faces” technique. That’s where I search all the individual photos for people in the background. I cut out their faces and place them around the edges. People who may have been cut out of the main picture get into the Border of Faces. That takes a while to do but it ends up looking cool.

Well, I gotta get back to it now. I have to finish and I’ll probably even print it out and make a physical collage out of it. That’ll take a while.